Voice response systems enable users thereof to access information using a conventional telephone. The interaction between the users and the system comprises various voice prompts output by the system and responses thereto input, via the telephone keypad, by the user. Voice response systems are used by service providers, such as banks, to fully or partially automate telephone call answering or responding to queries. Typically a voice response system provides the capability to play voice prompts comprising recorded voice segments or speech synthesised from text and to receive responses thereto. The prompts are generally organised in the form of voice menus invoked by state tables. A state table can access and play a voice segment or synthesise speech from given text. The prompts are usually part of a voice application which is designed to, for example, allow a customer to query information associated with their various banks accounts.
An example of such a voice response system is the IBM CallPath DirectTalk/6000 product as described in "IBM CallPath DirectTalk/6000 General Information and Planning" and "IBM CallPath DirectTalk/6000 Voice Application Development" (IBM, DirectTalk, DirectTalk/6000 and CallPath are trade marks of International Business Machines Corporation).
The IBM DirectTalk/600 product provides voice mail capabilities. Voice mail provides features such as those found in a telephone answering machine together with the capability to manipulate any stored messages. For example, if a subscriber wishes to listen to the messages stored, the voice mail will use a voice response system to indicate how many messages have been received, at what time and, possibly, from whom. The list of messages are manipulated using various voice menus or prompts presented to the subscriber by the voice response system. The voice response system typically asks the subscriber whether or not the messages are to be stored or forwarded to another subscriber.
Facsimile mail systems also use voice response systems in a similar manner to voice mail systems. Subscribers of facsimile system can manipulate stored facsimiles or have selected documents faxed to a specified facsimile number. Again, the voice response system present the subscriber with various options or menus which are used to manipulated the facsimiles. Actions are selected from the voice menus using the DTMF tones generated by conventional DTMF telephones. U.S. Pat. No. 4,918,722 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,974,254 disclose methods and system for retrieving facsimile data using voice response systems.
As the users of such system may not be familiar with the use thereof, it is necessary to ensure that the instructions or voice prompts are sufficiently comprehensive to allow an novice user to successfully interact with the system.
However, the more competent users are in using a particular voice response system the more they begin to anticipate the various voice prompts and it becomes increasingly tedious for them to have to listen to such comprehensive instructions when more succinct instructions would suffice.